Lessons 48 Hours After the Parkland School Shooting

These horrific shooting tragedies bring out instant commentary in the fog of war. It’s time for gun control! It’s time to ban assault weapons and semi-assault weapons.! Ban the bump stocks! Students need to turn in their dangerous classmates We need psychological screenings Let’s ban gun sales to those with mental illness. Don’t let teenagers have guns. Our campuses need armed security guards. Blame it on the NRA Blame it on President Trump Here’s what we know. Two decades of school shootings have not brought solutions to ending the parade of tragedies. The Marjory Stoneham Douglas High School tragedy is one of the few shooting incidents when people immediately know who the shooter is before his identity is discovered. Nickolas Cruz at Parkland, like Cho Seung-Hoi at Virginia Tech, was a known risk. Yet they fell through the law enforcement cracks. 20 Sheriff calls to Cruz’s house over the past two years! The FBI twice failed to follow up or sufficiently investigate specific warnings about him. What good does it do to warn when the authorities don’t follow up? The FBI has a lot of explaining to do. The FBI Hotline averages 2,100 calls/day, but they have a protocol to respond to warnings like the January call about Cruz. It didn’t happen! Just a few weeks ago the Democrats were castigating the Republicans attacking the FBI leadership as an attack on the FBI. They are not springing today to the FBI’s defense. The best rules, protocols or procedures are ineffective in the face of human error, negligence, or incompetence. Psychology still cannot differentiate in advance most of those who pose a threat from those who don’t. “Red Flag” laws though can remove weapons from those who have acted dangerously in the past. Psychology will not tell us in advance which mentally ill patients have gone off their meds prior to shooting up schools or committing suicide. The high school had armed security, but security officers can’t be everywhere at once, especially at a high school with 3,000 students. “Gun-Free” schools are not a bar to shooters. Perhaps a number of teachers and staffers should be allowed to carry concealed weapons with the intent to use them against an armed intruder. The best defense against force is force in the active shooter scenario. Parkland and Sandy Hook show that active shooter drills and exercises save lives. Metal detectors and security would not have stopped Cruz as he mingled with the students who were leaving school. Why not take a look at violent video games which give “extra lives,” thereby cheapening the prices of human life and violence? How’s this for a radical thought for the media? DON’T PUBLISH THE ASSAILANT’S NAME. Strip them of the notoriety they so desperately crave